Episode Five

Part One

            "Harry, I don't belong here." Gwen said urgently. She had sat him down near the pond, far enough out of ear shot that no one should hear her. She had decided it was time to tell someone at Hogwarts and Harry seemed the most willing to listen.

            "Well, I know you have trouble paying attention in class, but Hermione would gladly tutor you."

            "It's not that Harry. I'm different from all of you. I come from another world entirely."

            "How do you mean?"

            "I mean I… I'm not really... God this is so hard to explain."

            "Well take your time." He said, smiling reassuringly and placing his hand on top of hers in a bold gesture of friendship. The gesture didn't go quite as planned. She fell into some kind of trance and began whispering in a strange tongue. Harry couldn't pull away, it was almost as if his hand were glued to hers. He'd only ever witnessed something like it when Professor Trelawney had spoken her strange premonition during the Divination final little more than a year before.

            She suddenly stopped, looked directly at him and uttered a single word: Yggdrasil. Her eyes closed and she relaxed visibly.

            "Gwen?" He ventured.

            "Yeah." She blinked.

            "You ok?"

            "I don't know. What happened?"

            "You fell into a trance and were speaking some language I didn't understand. You said Yggdrasil."        

            "Yeah, it's the world tree in Norse mythology."

            "Does that mean anything to you?"

"It sort of means something, but not anything I can easily explain."

            "You have a lot of trouble explaining things huh?" He smiled. "Don't worry, I have patience."

            "You had me fooled."

Part Two

            Gwen thought on Odin. He sacrificed his eye to drink from the well of Mimir, under the root of Asgard on the world tree to gain vision of the long range future. And then he speared himself and hung from the Gallows Tree as a corpse to learn the secret alphabet of the runes.

            She knew this from her other reality, the world she felt was real, though less and less the more time she spent dreaming at Hogwarts. She had learned about the Norse myths from her friend Graves. He was very well versed in such matters and he had even encouraged Gwen to make a set of runes for herself. And to impress Graves she did so out of rocks where on she painted the ancient symbols. She rarely used her runes though. She felt they were powerfully magic and not to be tinkered with lightly.

What could it mean? Obviously Gwen had some impressive divination skills. She had shown early promise when she began taking classes with Trelawney but with the ridicule the practice received, Gwen quit after her fourth year at Hogwarts and hadn't since picked up a deck of tarot or a set of runes.

She sighed. One more mystery to add to the pile and she still hadn't told Harry everything she had wanted to.